Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

by Helen Simonson

  Alone in the house he felt the full weight of exhaustion settle on him like iron shackles. He considered stopping in the living room for a reviving brandy, but there was no fire in the grate and the house suddenly seemed chill and dark. He decided to go straight to bed. The small staircase, with its faded oriental runner, loomed as steep and impassable as Everest’s Hillary Steps. He braced his arm on the polished walnut banister and began to haul himself up the narrow treads. He considered himself to be generally in good health and made a point of doing a full set of stretching exercises every day, including several deep knee bends. Yet today—overcome by the strain, he supposed—he had to pause halfway up the stairs to catch his breath. It occurred to him to wonder what would happen if he passed out and fell. He saw himself lying splayed out across the bottom treads, head down and blue in the face. It might be days before he was found. He had never thought of this before. He shook his shoulders and straightened up his back. It was ridiculous to think of it now, he reprimanded himself. No good acting like a poor old man just because Bertie had died. He took the remaining stairs with as regular and fluid a step as he could manage and did not allow himself to puff and pant until he had gained his bedroom and sunk down on the soft wide bed in relief.

  Chapter 3

  Two days passed before it occurred to the Major that Mrs. Ali had not called in to check on him and that this had caused him a certain disappointment. The paper boy was quite well again, judging by the ferocity with which the Times was thrown at his front door. He had had his share of other visitors. Alice Pierce from next door had come round yesterday with a hand-painted condolence card and a casserole dish of what she said was her famous organic vegetarian lasagna and informed him that it was all over the village that he had lost his brother. There was enough of the pale brown and green mush to feed an army of organic vegetarian friends. Unfortunately, he did not have the same kind of Bohemian friends as Alice and so the dish was now fermenting in his refrigerator, spreading its unpleasant plankton smell into the milk and butter. Today, Daisy Green, the Vicar’s wife, dropped by unannounced with her usual entourage of Alma Shaw and Grace DeVere from the Flower Guild and insisted on making him a cup of tea in his own house. Usually it made the Major chuckle to see the trinity of ladies going about the business of controlling all social and civic life in the village. Daisy had seized the simple title of Flower Guild chairwoman and used it to endow herself with full noblesse oblige. The other ladies swam in her wake like frightened ducklings, as she flew about offering unsolicited advice and issuing petty directives which somehow people found it easier to follow than refuse. It amused him that Father Christopher, the Vicar, thought he chose his own sermons and that Alec Shaw, retired from the Bank of England, was made to join the Halloween Fun Committee and host junior pétanque on the village green despite being almost medically allergic to children. It amused him less when, treating their spinster friend as a project, Daisy and Alma would ask Grace to play her harp or greet people at the door at various charity events, while consigning certain other unattached ladies to cloakroom and tea serving duties. Even today, they had conspired to make a presentation of Grace. She was fully primped, her slightly elongated face made papery with pale powder and a girly pink lipstick, a coquettish scarf tied in a bow under her left ear as if she were off to a party.

  Grace was actually quite a sharp and pleasant woman at times. She was very knowledgeable about roses and about local history. The Major remembered a conversation they had enjoyed in the church one day, when he had found her carefully examining seventeenth-century wedding records. She had worn white cotton gloves to protect the books from her fingers and had been unconcerned about her own clothes, which had been coated with soft dust. “Look,” she had whispered, a magnifying lens held close to the pale brown ink scribbles of an ancient vicar. “It says, ‘Mark Salisbury married this day to Daniela de Julien, late of La Rochelle.’ This is the first record of Huguenots settling in the village.” He had stayed with her a half hour or so, watching her page reverently through the subsequent years, looking for hints and clues to the tangle of old families in the area. He had offered to lend her a recent history of Sussex that might be of use, only to find that she had a copy already. She also owned several more obscure and wonderful old texts that he ended up borrowing from her. For a brief while, he had considered pursuing their friendship. However, Daisy and Alma had no sooner learned of the conversation than they had begun to interfere. There were coy comments in the street, a whispered word or two at the golf club bar. Finally they had sent Grace to a luncheon date with him, all made up and forced into a hideous silk dress. She looked as ruched and tied as a holiday pork roast. They must have filled her head with advice on men, too, so that she sat and made frozen conversation all through her green salad (no dressing) and plain fish, while he chewed a steak and kidney pie as if it were shoe leather and watched the hands of the pub clock creep unwillingly around the dial. He remembered that he had dropped her at her door with mingled relief and regret.

  Today, Grace was left to keep him pinned in the living room with whispery conversation about the weather while Daisy and Alma clattered the cups and banged the tray and talked to him at the tops of their voices from the kitchen. He caught Grace shifting her eyes to the left and right around the room and knew all three of them were inspecting him and his house for signs of neglect and decline. He squirmed in his chair with impatience until the tea was brought in.

  “There’s nothing like a good cup of tea from a real china pot, is there?” said Daisy, handing him his cup and saucer. “Biscuit?”

  “Thank you,” he said. They had brought him a large tin of assorted “luxury” biscuits. The tin was printed with views of thatched cottages of England and the biscuits were appropriately tumescent; stuffed with fudge, dribbled with pastel icing, or wrapped in assorted foils. He suspected that Alma had picked it out. Unlike her husband, Alec, who was proud of his history as an East End boy, Alma tried hard to forget her origins in London; but she sometimes betrayed herself with a taste for showy luxuries and the sweet tooth of someone who grew up without quite enough to eat. The other ladies, he suspected, were hiding their mortification. He selected an undecorated shortbread and took a bite. The ladies settled themselves on chairs, smiling at him with compassion as if watching a starving cat lap from a saucer of milk. It was somewhat difficult to chew under the scrutiny and he took a large swallow of tea to help the sandy biscuit down. The tea was weak and tasted of paper. He was rendered speechless by the realization that they had brought their own teabags as well.

  “Was your brother older than you?” asked Grace. She leaned toward him, her eyes wide with compassion.

  “No—younger, actually, by two years.” There was a pause.

  “He was ill for some time?” she asked hopefully.

  “No, quite sudden, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m so, so very sorry.” She fussed with her fingers at the large green stone brooch at her high-collared neck. She cast her eyes down at the carpet, as if looking for a thread of conversation in the geometric patterns of the faded Bokhara. The other ladies busied themselves with their teacups and there was a palpable desire in the room for the conversation to move on. Grace, however, could not find her way out.

  “Was his family with him at the end?” she said, looking at him desperately. He was tempted to tell her that no, Bertie had died alone in an empty house and been discovered weeks later by the charlady from next door. It would be satisfying to puncture the vapid conversation with the nail of deliberate cruelty. However, he was aware of the other two women watching her struggle and doing nothing to help.

  “His wife was with him when they took him to the hospital and his daughter was able to see him for a few minutes, I understand,” he said.

  “Ah, that’s wonderful,” she said.

  “Wonderful,” echoed Daisy, and smiled at him as if this wiped away any further obligation to be sad.

  “It must be a great comfort to yo
u to know he died surrounded by family,” added Alma. She took a large bite from a fat dark chocolate biscuit. A faint chemical odor of bitter orange reached the Major’s nostrils. He would have liked to reply that this was not so, that he was pierced with pain that no one had thought to call him until it was all over and that he had missed saying goodbye to his younger brother. He wanted to spit this at them, but his tongue felt thick and useless.

  “And of course he was surrounded by the comfort of the Lord,” said Daisy. She spoke in an awkward rush as if she were bringing up something vaguely impolite.

  “Amen,” whispered Alma, selecting a crème sandwich.

  “Oh, go to hell,” whispered the Major into the translucent bottom of his teacup and covered his muttering with a cough.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” he said, waving from the doorstep and feeling more generous now that they were leaving.

  “We’ll come again soon,” promised Daisy.

  “Lovely to see the Vierge de Cléry still blooming,” added Grace, touching her fingertips to a nodding stem of white cabbage rose as she slipped through the gate behind them. He wished she had spoken about the roses earlier. The afternoon might have passed more pleasantly. Of course it wasn’t their fault, he reminded himself. They were following the accepted rituals. They were saying what they could at a time when even the finest poetry must fail to comfort. They were probably genuinely concerned for him. Perhaps he had been too churlish.

  It surprised him that his grief was sharper than in the past few days. He had forgotten that grief does not decline in a straight line or along a slow curve like a graph in a child’s math book. Instead, it was almost as if his body contained a big pile of garden rubbish full both of heavy lumps of dirt and of sharp thorny brush that would stab him when he least expected it. If Mrs. Ali had dropped in—and he felt again the slight pique that she had not—she would have understood. Mrs. Ali, he was sure, would have let him talk about Bertie. Not the deceased body already liquefying in the ground, but Bertie as he was.

  The Major stepped out into the now empty garden to feel the sun on his face, shutting his eyes and breathing slowly to lessen the impact of an image of Bertie in the ground, cold green flesh softening into jelly. He folded his arms over his chest and tried not to sob aloud for Bertie and for himself, that this should be all the fate left to them.

  The warmth of the sun held him up and a small brown chaffinch, worrying the leaves of the yew, seemed to chide him for being lugubrious. He opened his eyes to the bright afternoon and decided that he might benefit from a short walk through the village. He might stop in at the village shop to purchase some tea. It would, he thought, be generous of him to make a visit and give the busy Mrs. Ali a chance to make her excuses for not coming to see him.

  He had been many decades, as man and boy, in the village of Edgecombe St. Mary, and yet the walk down the hill to the village never ceased to give him pleasure. The lane was steeply cambered to either side, as if the narrow tarmac were the curving roof of some buried chamber. The dense hedges of privet, hawthorn, and beech swelled together as fat and complacent as medieval burghers. The air was scented with their spicy dry fragrance overlaid with the tang of animals in the fields behind the cottages. Garden gates and driveways gave glimpses of well-stocked gardens and thick lawns studded with clover clumps and dandelions. He liked the clover, evidence of the country always pressing in close, quietly sabotaging anyone who tried to manicure nature into suburban submission. As he rounded a curve, the hedges gave way to the plain wire fence of a sheep field and allowed a view of twenty miles of Sussex countryside spreading beyond the roofs of the village below. Behind him, above his own house, the hills swelled upward into the rabbit-cropped grass of the chalk downs. Below him, the Weald of Sussex cradled fields full of late rye and the acid yellow of mustard. He liked to pause at the stile, one foot up on the step, and drink in the landscape. Something—perhaps it was the quality of the light, or the infinite variety of greens in the trees and hedges—never failed to fill his heart with a love of country that he would have been embarrassed to express aloud. Today, he leaned on the stile and tried to let the colors of the landscape soak in and calm him. The business at hand, of visiting the shop, had somehow quickened his heart and overlaid the dullness of grief with an urgent and not unpleasant flutter. The shop lay only a few hundred yards downhill of his position, and the wonders of gravity helped him as he thrust away from the stile and continued to stride down the hill. He made the turn past the Royal Oak at the bottom, its timbered façade almost entirely obscured by hanging baskets of improbably colored petunias, and the shop came into view across the gently rising roundel of the village green.

  The orange plastic sign, “Supersaver SuperMart,” winked in the low September sun. Mrs. Ali’s nephew was pasting to the plate glass window a large poster advertising a sale on canned peas; the Major hesitated in mid-stride. He would rather have waited until the nephew was not around. He did not like the young man’s perpetual frown, which, he admitted, might be the simple result of unfortunately prominent eyebrows. It was a ridiculous and indefensible dislike, the Major had more than once admonished himself, but it caused his hand to once again tighten around the head of his cane as he marched over the grass and in at the door. The shop bell’s tinkle made the young man look up from his task. He nodded and the Major gave a slightly smaller nod in return and looked around for Mrs. Ali.

  The store contained a single small counter and cash register up front, backed by a display of cigarettes and a lottery machine. Four narrow but clean aisles stretched back through the low-ceilinged rectangular room. They contained a well-stocked but plain selection of foods. There were beans and bread, teabags and dried pasta, frozen curries and bags of curly chips and chicken nuggets for children’s suppers. There was also a large array of chocolates and sweets, a card section, the newspapers. Only the canisters of loose tea and a dish of homemade samosas hinted at Mrs. Ali’s exotic heritage. There was an awkward extension in the back that contained a small area of bulk items like dry dog food, potting soil, some kind of chicken pellets, and plastic-wrapped multipacks of Heinz baked beans. The Major couldn’t imagine who purchased bulk items here. Everyone did their main shopping at the supermarket in Hazelbourne-on-Sea or drove to the new superstore and outlet center in Kent. It was also possible to hop over to France on a cheap ferry, and he often saw his neighbors staggering home with giant boxes of washing powder and strangely shaped bottles of cheap foreign beer from the Calais hypermarket. For most people, the village shop was strictly for when one had run out of something, especially late at night. The Major noticed that they never thanked Mrs. Ali for being open until eight on weeknights and also on Sunday mornings, but they loved to mumble about the prices being high and they speculated about Mrs. Ali’s income from being an authorized lottery dealer.

  He did not hear or sense Mrs. Ali’s presence in the empty store and so, rather than scour each aisle, the Major made his way as casually as possible back toward the bulk sales area, quite ignoring the tea canisters near the front counter and cash register. Beyond this area was the shop office, a small area hidden behind a curtain of stiff vertical vinyl panels.

  He had inspected the prices on each stack of bulk items and had shifted to reviewing the ham-and-egg pies in the back-wall dairy case when Mrs. Ali finally appeared through the vinyl, carrying an armful of Halloween-themed boxes of mini apple pies.

  “Major Pettigrew,” she said with surprise.

  “Mrs. Ali,” he replied, almost distracted from his purpose by the realization that American Halloween hoopla was making inroads into British baked goods.

  “How are you?” She looked around for somewhere to put the boxes.

  “Fine, fine,” he said. “I wanted to thank you for your kindness the other day.”

  “No, no, it was nothing.” She seemed to want to wave her hands but, encumbered by the pies, she could only waggle her fingertips. “And I wanted to apologize—” he began.r />
  “Please don’t mention it,” she said, and her face tightened as she looked past his shoulder. The Major felt between his shoulder blades the presence of the nephew. He turned around. The nephew seemed bulkier in the narrow aisle, his face shadowed by the bright daylight from the shop front. The Major moved aside to let him pass, but the young man stopped and also stepped aside. An invisible pull invited the Major to pass him and exit the shop. His body, stubborn with the desire to stay, kept him planted where he was.

  He sensed that Mrs. Ali did not wish him to go on with his apologies in front of her nephew.

  “Again, I just wanted to thank you both for your kind condolences,” he said, particularly pleased with the “both,” which dropped in softly, like a perfectly putted golf ball. The nephew was forced to nod his head in appreciation.

  “Anything we can do, you must just ask, Major,” said Mrs. Ali. “Beginning, perhaps, with some fresh tea?”

  “I am running a little low,” said the Major.

  “Very well.” She lifted her chin and spoke to the nephew while looking at a space somewhere over his head. “Abdul Wahid, would you fetch the rest of the Halloween specials and I’ll take care of the Major’s tea order?” She marched past both of them with her armful of cake boxes and the Major followed, squeezing by the nephew with an apologetic smile. The nephew only scowled and then disappeared behind the vinyl curtain.

  Dumping the boxes on the counter Mrs. Ali rummaged behind it for her spiral-bound order book and began to leaf through the pages.

  “My dear lady,” began the Major. “Your kindness to me—”

  “I would rather not discuss it in front of my nephew,” she whispered and a brief frown marred the smoothness of her oval face. “I don’t quite understand,” said the Major.